Charlotte Gray winner of the 2014 Toronto Book Award
Charlotte Gray is the winner of the 2014 Toronto Book Award for her non-fiction book, The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master and the Trial that Shocked a Country.
The announcement was made at the awards ceremony at the Toronto Reference Library’s Bram & Bluma Appel Salon on the evening of Thursday October 16th.
“I offer my warm congratulations to Charlotte Gray, who has drawn an unforgettable portrait of Toronto’s social life at the beginning of the 20th century,” said Acting City Librarian Anne Bailey. “In telling the true story of Carrie Davies, the maid who shot a Massey, Charlotte Gray captures the class conflict and societal upheaval that marked our city’s reinvention of itself at the onset of the Great War. As the author notes in her introduction: ‘A single bullet fired on Walmer Road had an extraordinary significance.’”
Gray was selected among 70 entries and is one of Canada’s pre-eminent biographers and historians. She has won many awards for her work, including the prestigious Pierre Berton Award for a body of historical writing, the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, the Ottawa Book Award, and the CAA Birks Family Foundation Award for Biography. Her nine books have brought our past to life. A member of the Order of Canada, Gray was a panelist for the 2013 edition of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads.
Gray's non-fiction book, The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master and the Trial that Shocked a Country was chosen from a list of finalists that included Anthony De Sa for his novel, Kicking The Sky; Carrianne K. Y. Leung for her novel, The Wondrous Woo; Nick Saul and Andrea Curtis for their social science - agriculture & food book, The Stop: How the Fight for Good Food Transformed a Community and Inspired a Movement; and Shyam Selvadurai for his novel, The Hungry Ghosts.
Congratulations Charlotte Gray!
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